Friday, 28 March 2014

Triskele Books is always keen to hear about other author collectives, and today we are pleased to welcome the USA-based Indie-Visible to the Triskele blog. IndieVisible members were kind enough to answer our questions.

1) What brought you all together and when? And how did you come up with the name, IndieVisible? It was the brain child of Jordan Rosenfeld and Chelsea Starling, in October 2012. We both were feeling creatively isolated and frustrated with publishing. Chelsea had already come up with the name for a different idea which was to review indie authors, but we felt it worked well for the collective model that we began to dream up. We individually invited in creative, talented writers who had skills and ambition that aligned with our dream of putting out quality books without a gatekeeper to do it for us.

2) What factors triggered your decision to go indie?

Each of us has a different answer for this. Most of us have either been published by the mainstream in one form or another and were dissatisfied with wait times, finding new agents, lack of creative control, and the rest had seen that now was the time to take publishing into our own hands thanks to technology and attitudes changing.

3) One thing we’ve been working on at Triskele Books is how best to communicate between members –– email, Skype, Facebook? How do you work as a team, in terms of communication, and getting tasks done? And how do you resolve any differences of opinion?

We have a private Facebook group that works well for us. We tried doing Google Hangouts, but we are spread all around the world in different time zones (we have one member in Australia, and one in New Zealand!) and it was too difficult to coordinate a time that worked well for us. As far as teamwork goes, different members offer different skills, and we rely on everyone to pitch in what they can to make it work.

4) Like Triskele Books do you each retain the rights to your own books, pay the costs of publication and receive the full royalties? And if so, what elements are done collectively?

We have two cover/graphic/web designers on our team, several editors, and a book trailer producer. We generally pay each other for the work we need done, but at a discounted price. Authors publish independently, with our indie-visible badge printed on the spine and back cover if the author wishes.

5) What do you see as the benefits of being in a collective? Any disadvantages?

6) Do your authors use the same designer? And do you try and go for a shared look or feel? Does Indie-Visible have a unique selling point?

Chelsea Starling created the branding for Indie-Visible along with a handful of the collective’s book covers and websites. Victoria Faye also created a handful of our covers. They design the covers with the story and author in mind, not with the collective in mind - aside from the fact that they produce quality, professional covers, which is a requirement within our collective. Our members are free to hire any designer they prefer, so long as the end result does not look cheesy and homemade.

7) Are you actively seeking new members? And if so, what sort of criteria must new authors and members meet, to become part of Indie-Visible?

We are not currently seeking new members, but if there was a person who had a crazy talent for marketing, we’d bring them on board in a heartbeat!

8) Would you like to tell us about your plans for 2014 and beyond?

We’re still gathering momentum. Many of us have new books coming out. We’d like to be more of a resource to other writers, and we do have a FB group called the Indie-Visible Lounge that anyone is free to join, as well as using our social media to share what has worked for us marketing wise.

9) How do you see the future of publishing generally?

Publishing in general seems to be a lot like the Sneeches on the Beaches story by Dr. Seuss. Gone is the time when authors with “stars upon thars” are the only “real” authors. Amazon changed everything - now anyone with an offbeat story that would never have gotten picked up by an agent or publisher can find their audience. And as E.L. James proved, even poorly written erotica is a viable market. The playing field has been leveled, and we expect to see a combination of publishing scenarios - indies, hybrids and traditionally published authors all thriving in the future. We’ve seen a trend for novellas and serial novels making a comeback, and wouldn’t be surprised to see more and more readers gravitating toward bite-sized works that can be read during lunch breaks, on commuter trains, etc.

Thanks very much for answering our questions, and we wish you the best of luck with your independent publishing ventures!

Friday, 21 March 2014

by Catriona Troth(See here for Triskele's interview with Kit Habianic)
“What matters most: to be right, to be loved or to belong?”

Thirty years ago, the miners’ strike set miners against pit
bosses and government, working men against policemen, neighbour against
neighbour. It ripped apart communities and drove families to destitution. And nowhere were its effects more
deeply felt than in South Wales.

Kit Habianic’s Until Our Blood Is Dry takes us into the heart of one of these communities.
She shows us the men driven by desperation to save the life of the coal mines –
even though they know those jobs are likely to kill them, either slowly through
illnesses such as ‘black lung’ or abruptly, in rock falls or gas explosions. She shows us the different kind of desperation
that drives the handful of ‘scabs’ to defy their unions and cross the picket
lines to go back to work. She
shows us the white-collar managers, making decisions about the future of the
mines with scant understanding of the lives that depend on them. And above all,
she shows us the women fighting to hold their families together – standing on
the picket lines, organising collections and finding ways of putting food on the
table even when the last penny has been spent.

“You lasses,” as one of the men says; “more balls, more
brains, more guts than any of us.”

Her heroine, Helen, barely sixteen herself, is caught
between her father, an overman and one of the hated ‘scabs,’ and Scrapper
Jones, the boy she loves, who is a hot-headed strike supporter. In the course
of the book, she learns a lifetime’s worth of lessons about the price of
loyalty and the need to love and to belong.

If I say this is an important book, I am in danger of making
it sound ‘worthy’ and dull. It is
anything but that. Habianic captures the beauty of the South Wales valleys, the
sound of Welsh voices and the strength and heart-breaking tragedy of these
lives.

The world Habianic describes is long gone, swept away in the
wholesale pit closures that followed the breaking of the strike. So is this now
just a piece of history? Today, when more and more families are turning to food banks to meet their basic
needs, it’s worth remembering what happens when ordinary working people are
driven to desperation. Even more, it is worth remembering some of those
‘workless’ generations who are subject to so much scorn today are in that
situation because the industries that once sustained them were systematically
dismantled without anything being put in their place.

You'll enjoy this if you like: Stories of Rebels and Outsiders from Saturday Night, Sunday Morning to Feral Youth

Avoid if you dislike: Women on the front line, Working Class Heroes, Wales

Ideal accompaniments: Welsh cakes and a cup of tea. And a pint of Brains SA for when the going gets tough.

Welcome to the Book Club, Kit, tell us about your new novel, Until Our Blood is Dry, and the inspirations behind it ...

Thank you so much for inviting me.

Until Our Blood is Dry is the story of two families and a South Wales industrial community caught up in the 1984-1985 miners’ strike that closed the UK’s pits for nearly a year. The strike was a defining event for the miners, their families and wider communities, not least because they lost the strike, then lost their livelihoods as the government then shut pit after pit.

The dispute has left deep scars to this day, yet very little fiction explores this directly and none really looks at the strike from the women’s point of view. There’s David Peace’s GB84 and Philip Henscher’s The Northern Clemency, which uses the strike as a backdrop, and Billy Elliott, the hugely successful screenplay reworked into a novel.

But I wanted to dig deeper into the issues raised by the strike – issues of loyalty and identity and belonging, and pragmatism versus principle, of a man’s world ripped apart and women stepping forward.

The miners had everything to win and everything to lose. They gambled everything and lost; people had their livelihoods and certainties and hopes ripped apart.Characterisation is clearly important to you, where do you start when plotting a new character?

Character evolves and is not planned or plotted. It may start with a voice, or a strongly-held viewpoint, or a relationship or an event in the news. It’s almost always a blend of random and eclectic influences that somehow come together to create something that is nothing like the sum of its parts.

I once wrote a story about a squaddie who comes unstuck in Iraq that sprang from the story of a businessman beheaded in Jordan and a laddish Welsh voice that popped into my head as I was waiting for a bus after a writing class one night, while listening to Mass Destruction by Faithless. That’s how irrational and disconnected the process usually is.

When I think about Gwyn, the main character in Until Our Blood is Dry, I have a strong visual image of Andy Serkis playing Gollum in Lord of the Rings. Though no one who reads the book is likely to see any resemblance between the overman at Blackthorn Colliery and a Hollywood take on Tolkien’s Stoor Hobbit.

You show the miner’s strike from the point of view of the strikers, the women who supported them, and the strikebreakers. Why was important to see the story from all three sides?To this day, the strike is a divisive issue across the UK’s one-time coalfields. A conflict of that intensity throws out some very fundamental questions, of loyalty, of choosing sides, of right versus wrong and pragmatism versus principle.

Thirty years on, there are many truths about the strike and I felt the only way to get anywhere close to the heart of the matter was to build the story around two characters pitted on opposite sides of the dispute, and a character caught in the middle who could go either way.

Despite the polarisation, the characters go through periods of questioning and doubt and soul-searching. In fact, the should-Is and what-ifs are not so black and white.

Where were you during the 1984 miner’s strike? Do you have memories or family connections?

My Welsh family is rooted in the mining communities of South Wales. My great-grandfather worked at Oakdale colliery in Blackwood.

The year of the strike was the year I left Wales. I felt desperately homesick watching the conflict played out in the media. When my family moved back to South Wales, I lived and went to school in the area’s mining villages.

When the strike began, there was a lot of solidarity work supporting the miners beyond the coalfields. Like many students, I got involved with that.

Why do you think it’s important to tell this story now? Why is it still relevant today?

Thirty years on, some people look back on the strike as a kind of civil war that split our country into warring camps.

I see it as at the very least a defining event for Wales and for industrial communities across the UK, symbolic of a time when the economy was shifting from making stuff to servicing stuff.

That shift shaped how working men and women made a living and how they saw themselves and their prospects. But it also marks a shift from a male-dominated economy to one where women start to come forward.

All of that has an effect on all of us today.

Although March 2014 marks the 30th anniversary of the start of the strike, the shockwaves from the events of that year are still making themselves felt. People from all sides of the dispute feel passionately, still, about the events of that year and what they meant.

I believe that arriving at a title for this book was quite a convoluted process. Can you tell us about that?

Richard, my publisher, is a poet and was keen to choose a title that had resonance but that wasn’t obvious. Until Our Blood is Dry is a line from the poem Gwalia Deserta by Idris Davies. Gwalia Deserta is Welsh culture’s answer to TS Eliot’s The Wasteland and the line refers to the General Strike of 1926.

The minute Rich suggested it, it felt right.Strong settings are a feature of your writing, how do you decide where to set your novels and how important is location to you?Sense of place has always been important to my stories, and South Wales lends itself very much to that. It’s not such a stretch to feel inspired by the bleakness of former mining towns, or the vividness of rain-dashed hills, or the brashness of Barry Island. I wanted landscape to function almost as a character in UOBiD. The winding tower at Blackthorn, my fictional colliery, pretty much has a speaking part...How do you handle research into the period under discussion, do you love or loathe research?

Research is the fun part. I spent weeks, months at the British Library, the South Wales Miners Archive at Swansea University and at Collingdale Newspaper Library, read pamphlets, listened to wobbly cassette recordings from the year of the strike, looked at how the newspapers reported the events and how the miners and their women hit back at those accounts.

Right now, I’m working on a second novel set in contemporary London and am struggling with it because there’s no research to dive into, no body of history or literature or writing to kick-start the planning and plotting.What’s your writing process? And has it changed over the years?

When I wrote UOBiD, I plotted the whole novel in the sense that I jotted down 15 lines that summarised what would happen in each of 15 chapters. I then sat down and wrote a chapter a week, every week for about three months. At the end of it I had a novel. Just not a very good one.I then rewrote and rewrote and rewrote, over and over and over. Never again.

I think there’s a place for planning, and that the pile-driver approach is perhaps an antidote to the kind of aimless faffing that so many of us writers do so well.

But I threw myself at the project as though it was a journalistic assignment and then struggled to excavate the emotion and the themes and the nuances from the storytelling.

What do you think your Welsh background brings to your writing?

Rhythm? Also an outsider sensibility and a large dollop of bloody-mindedness.In a Desert Island discs style, if you could only keep three books with you for life, which would they be?Three? Just three? That’s so hard.

How about two all-time favourites, plus one less-travelled book stuffed full of stories within stories that would be fun to revisit?

Giovanni’s Room by James Baldwin, The Outsider by Albert Camus definitely. Then maybe the Richard Burton collection of stories from the Arabian Nights. Or Angela Carter’s Fairy Tales? Or the collected short stories of John Cheever or Alice Munro or Raymond Carver?

Friday, 7 March 2014

It took me a long time to get into Twitter. I was resistant for
all the usual reasons (what is the point of telling everyone what you had for
breakfast in 140 characters or less?) but also because I couldn’t get the hang
of how I could focus on people who were saying something I might be interested
in.

I have to say, though, when I was finally persuaded to take
it seriously, it took me about a month to go from sceptical to seriously
addicted.

I didn’t tweet to begin with. I just went looking for interesting
feeds. I started in the obvious places –
the radio channels I listen to, the newspapers I read, the magazines I’d LIKE
to read but somehow never have time for. I discovered that these would often alert
me to articles that were absolutely fascinating, but which otherwise I would probably
have missed. All I had to do was click on the link at the end of the tweet, and
there they were! Magic.

Keeping half an eye on feeds like @BBCNews ensured that I could be the first to pick up on breaking news stories. A quick skim was enough to filter those stories I was interested in and the rest I could ignore. Easy, too, to pick up news from Canada, where I grew up.

I started tentatively retweeting some of my discoveries. I
even composed a tweet or two of my own, feeling desperately self-conscious. As
I started exploring some of the less trodden paths of the Twittersphere, the
number of people I was following exploded.
And I started to gain a few followers of my own.

At this point I should probably stop and explain a few basics
for those to whom Twitter is still an alien land. (If you are already a seasoned explorer, just skip
to the end of the indented text.)

Generally speaking, if you put
something out on Twitter, it is there, in public for anyone to see, whether they
have a Twitter account or not. However, once you have an account of your own,
you have two basic ways of looking at the Twitterverse.

If you click on someone’s Twitter
handle (a name starting with @) you will see an image, a few details about
them, and then everything they have tweeted, in chronological order, starting
with the most recent. There will also be
a button, next to their name, which will give you an option to Follow them.

If you now go back to your Home
page, you’ll see the tweets from everyone you have chosen to follow, all mixed
up together, sorted in chronological order and constantly updated.

As I discovered, it’s very easy to get carried away in those
early days following all manner of people.
Suddenly your home page is updating with tweets every couple of
seconds. You can’t possibly keep track
of it all and you’re missing those real-time updates that were the reason you
got excited about Twitter in the first place.
DON’T PANIC. This is where Lists
come in.

Lists allow you to sort the accounts you follow into groups
(and ignore those ones you followed just to be friendly and which turned out to
be a little bit boring...)

For example, I am interested in writing and news about book
awards. So I have a list of people who
tweet interesting things on these topics, which is quite separate from my list
of current affairs feeds. So when I want to see what is going on in the literary world, I click on that list
and I see ONLY the tweets from those people I have put in that list. And when I
want my 6pm news fix, I can switch to my current affairs list.

Creating a list couldn’t be
easier. Just right-click on a name of
someone you follow and you will see an option to <add to / remove from
lists>. Select that and you will see the names of lists you have already
created, with tick boxes next to them, plus an option to ‘create new list’.

Now you are following lots of interesting people. What about getting people to follow you?

I
made a conscious decision from the start that I wasn’t going to chase the
maximum number of followers. There are
apps out there that will automatically follow other accounts for you, so many
per day, and weed out those that don’t follow back within a set period. They
can ramp up your followers pretty quickly. But I can’t see the point of having
ten thousand followers if only ten of them were actually interested in reading
what I have to say. So I focused on
interacting with people who were interested in the same issues as I was. I retweeted things they had to say that I
thought were interesting, and I posted stuff I thought they would engage with. It's a slower, more organic process, but one I hope will result in more committed followers - something along the lines of what what Dan Holloway (@agnieszkasshoes) calls ‘A Thousand True Fans.’ I am still a
long way from achieving that, but the goal is there.

[Note that it’s possible to
use management tools like Hootsuite to schedule tweets in advance, or spread
them out. Be careful, though, about
allowing management tools to auto-retweet for you. The things they choose to retweet may not
always be the things you would choose for yourself and it can be shortcut to
pissing off your followers.]

Now we come to some of the more interesting, less obvious
things about Twitter. We should probably start by talking about hashtags. Unless you have had your head buried in the
sand for the last five years, you will have heard people talk about
hashtags. But even people who use
Twitter can sometimes be confused about what they are and how to use them.

In essence, hashtags are just a
way of making it simpler to search for something. Pick a topic – say the love
of reading. You tweet something
interesting about the latest book releases and at the end of the tweet you
write #lovereading. If that hashtag
catches on, and lots of other people use it at the end of what they have to say
about the latest books, then anyone else will be able to type #lovereading into
Twitter’s search box and see a whole load of tweets about books and reading
from all kinds of people, whether they
follow them or not.

One of the most exciting ways of using hashtags, I think, is
in association with live events. People
attending those events can be told to use a particular hashtag (e.g. #LBF13 for
the London Book Fair or #ManBooker for the Booker Prize Awards night) and
anyone, anywhere can get a blow by blow account of what is happening more or
less in real time. So if you wanted to be, say, the first to know who won the Costa Book Award – you could check out #CostaBookAwards.

Twitter can also be an amazing way of connecting with people
you would otherwise have no easy way of contacting.

Call me old-fashioned, but ‘friending’ someone on Facebook
is quite a personal act. It presumes
some prior relationship – or suggests the desire for a future one. ‘Liking’ a Facebook Author page, on the other hand,
is quite a passive act. It places you in the role of ‘fan’.

Twitter on the other hand is both public and
egalitarian. What people say on there is
consciously intended for the whole world to see. And it enables its
participants to engage with one another on a level playing field.

Essentially, Twitter provides three ways to engage with
other users.

As well as retweeting someone else’s
tweet (which simply makes their tweet appear in your feed, visible to your
followers as well as theirs) you can REPLY.
This creates a conversation thread that links tweets together. It also sends the originator an alert that someone has
responded to their tweet.

By putting their twitter name at
the start of a tweet, you can send a tweet to them. This will appear in the list of tweets in
your account, but won’t be automatically shown to those who follow you (or them).

Finally you can send them a
direct message (a DM) which can only be seen by you and the recipient.
Personally, I am not a fan of unsolicited DMs, but they can be a useful way to follow up privately on a conversation
that opened in public.

Because of what I see as the egalitarian nature of Twitter,
it can be amazingly easy to connect with figures in the public eye. Of course, those with thousands upon
thousands of followers may sometimes be too busy to respond (though they often
do). But my first connection with Alex
Wheatle (@BrixtonBard, author of East of Acre Lane) and Horace Panter (@horacepanterart, bassist of the
Specials), both of whom I interviewed on my blog, came via Twitter. I didn’t jump right in and ask for an
interview. I followed them first,
engaged with what they had to say, waited until they had responded to me a few
times so they had some idea who I was.
But it worked! I got my interviews – and much more easily than with
others with whom my only point of contact was with their agent.

Finally, people, I need hardly say, that you should not use
Twitter to stand on your soap box saying, “My book’s coming out; buy my new
book!” Twitter is not about being a market trader on a slow Saturday. As Alexandra Heminsley (@hemmo) put it at Byte the
Book (#bytethebook), it is about ‘creating a generous space around you.’ Be authentic.
Be interesting. Make connections.

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